What is Toggling? Disambiguating Brand’s Story about Disinterestedness and Political Art

In an attempt to get clear about Peggy Brand’s defense of disinterestedness I explore her concept of toggling and suggest a way to clear up problems.  It is not simply that looking at the painting or the performance piece would open the feminist up to more experiences of a formalist sort but that there are other layers of meaning that enhance and enrich the experience of any viewer as we work through the different forms of attention, both interested and disinterested.  The enhancement by what Brand, perhaps misleadingly, calls “toggling” is not just additive but transformative in a progressive way.

This is an attempt to get clear about Peggy Brand's defense of disinterestedness in her paper "Disinterestedness and Political Art" which appears in Carolyn Korsmeyer's Aesthetics:  The Big Questions.  The basic claim is that political art in general and feminist art in particular can be appreciated not only in an interested manner but in a disinterested manner, in fact that it should be appreciated in both ways:  both disinterestedness and interestedness afford, taken together, the "fullest and fairest experience of a work of art."  The initial question to answer is why Brand, a feminist, would want to leave room for disinterested perception, which she herself labels as masculinist.  I think that Brand's approach is mostly correct, but sorting out the actual argument for it is difficult, and there are some ambiguities that need to be resolved.  A clue comes in her discussion of the history of the concept of disinterestedness.  She observes that disinterestedness was "both a moral and an aesthetic ideal" opposed to "private interest" and "serving one's own ends." It was contrasted with the desire to possess the object.  Relating this to the beautiful in women, we find that in Burke's writing the female body is only perceived as beautiful "if the sole interest of the perceiver is in perceiving for its own sake and not in the desire for possession." (156) 

Although Brand does not make this clear (and may not be aware of it herself), the original motive of disinterestedness was in the right direction from the standpoint of feminism. Perceiving a woman for her own sake and not as a possession is perceiving her as having her own ends. That is, disinterested attention, directed by men towards women is actually conducive to feminism both on an ethical and on an aesthetic level.  This establishes that disinterested perception has some value, even in the 18th century version, although during that period it was not always practiced with honesty.  In observing the female nude a "natural" reaction for a heterosexual male is sexually interested (I am not sure why Brand puts "natural" in quotes here.)  A much more problematic reaction is desire to possess and exploit the woman under question.  Disinterested perception breaks or at least brackets these predispositions. 

Brand then discusses this issue in relation to Arnheim's discussion of Ingres' La Source.  Arnheim is concerned that the image is so lifelike and sensuous that it makes "the observer almost forget that he is looking at" a work of art. Brand observes that the male observer has an "automatic response to the sexuality depicted" and it is difficult to be disinterested as a result. So, Arnheim's response is initially "unabashedly interested." Nonetheless Arnheim is subsequently able to focus on formal properties of the painting, i.e. the devices that make it "such a complete representation of life." Brand observes that he is able to isolate and interpret these properties because, as he says in another book, he can "peel off the context" to perceive the object "as though it existed in complete isolation" i.e. by way of "an abstraction" blocking associations with, as Brand puts it, "actual nude girls."  

This attempt to achieve mastery over one's own bodily response is, however, seen by most feminists as masculinist and as wrongful psychological censure.[1]  But Brand sees it as useful for the purposes of feminism.  It is not that she thinks that the observer can become totally neutral and unbiased or that one can become an unflawed mirror (as Stolnitz thought):  her view is that one can be disinterested in a relatively weak way, although, as we shall see, this is a weak way of putting the point.

 

Brand's main example is the work of Orlan called The Reincarnation of St. Orlan, a performance work in which Orlan seeks to represent "an ideal formulated by male desire" using the medium of her own body to deconstruct such images of women, and she does this by way of submitting herself to surgery.  The goal is to get women to not engage in reconstructive surgery.  

There are a lot of issues here but I want to keep to the question of the value of disinterestedness for the feminist.  One very effective way to discuss this issue is to focus on one image from Orlan's piece:  a scene from "Seventh Plastic Surgical Operation," Nov. 21, 1993.

The issue Brand raises is whether the empathy we naturally feel towards this woman under surgery should be or even can be blocked in order to perceive her disinterestedly, i.e. in such a way as to be fascinated by the "compositions of lights and darks" and by the "indecipherable" nature of the instruments and body parts.

Brand claims that she is taking a position "between the two extremes:  the traditional endorsement of masculinist disinterestedness ...and its feminist antithesis."  She is arguing for reconfiguring the masculinist approach "along revisionist lines." This can be achieved by "toggling" between the interested and disinterested approaches. (We shall see later that “toggling” is not quite the right metaphor for what Brand proposes.)  Now with respect to the image here: "seeing a still photograph out of its original context - a videotape of the surgical process - a viewer of a single image documenting Orlan's 'Omnipresence' scrambles to clarify the ambiguities of what is seen." 

We need to bear in mind (Brand does not mention this) that single shots like this are often considered part of the artwork, or one way of perceiving the artwork, when it comes to performance pieces.  In other words the performance is the event plus the still shots, often framed in galleries, and so forth.  The artwork is a collection of various related items and events. 

Interested attention (IA) occurs when one empathizes with the artist (or with the woman pictured, if one does not know her identity), but "a quick reminder that the image is a work of art and not just a picture of someone's cosmetic surgery might cause another reversal, this time a disengagement with the rapport one has established - a reversal of personal interest - to an intellectual engagement with the content of the work of art" i.e. recognition of Orlan's goal to "deconstruct mythological images of women" --- this would be Disinterested attention (DA) in the revisionist mode: that is, such attention would "engage intellectually and disengage emotionally" with the work.

Things may be a bit confusing here.  So I will hypothesize what I think Brand is getting at.  Let us posit the movement here as one that begins with the interested attention that goes along with the exploitive male gaze (Orlan is seen as properly enhancing her features through plastic surgery in order to better accommodate male desire) followed by disinterested attention of the classic sort in which the image of Orlan is seen in terms of lines and colors in certain relations and in which the initial male gaze is bracketed, followed by a feminist interested perception, in which Orlan is seen with sympathy, followed finally by a feminist disinterested perception which incorporates feminist theory, a kind of move to greater objectivity. The entire sequence is hardly the same as toggling a light switch:  for. although it goes from IA to DA to IA and back to DA, the IAs and DAs are different.

Going back to La Source, one can attend to the work using both DA and IA.  In DA one can focus on the color, texture and balance of the painting, and from IA (of the feminist sort) one can note that it objectifies the male gaze. 

There is much rather confusing talk in Brand's paper about psychologically ambiguous images such as the famous duck/rabbit, old woman, and pronged figures.  Her idea is that we perceive similarities between our mental sets and what we disambiguate (168).  She notes that in the psychological perceptual experiment using pronged figures when we get disambiguating visual cues we will read the pronged figures one way rather than another, and that "unambiguous sexualized predispositions" similarly explain the tendency for males like Arnheim to see La Source originally in a sexualized way.  (Why Brand believes that male sexualized predispositions are unambiguous is beyond me.) DA then allows them to switch and see it in another way, and presumably opens them up (although this is not explained in this article) to a second form of IA which is feminist.  I think the best way to deal with this material on perceptual ambiguity is to skip through it quickly since there is, after all, no cumulative aesthetic value in switching between the different ways of seeing the ambiguous pictures studied by psychologists.

Brand then tells us that "What is taking place [in the first DA] is a deliberate dis-ing of the gazer's tendency to use, take advantage of, desire, or possess the girl that is pictured [in the Ingres painting];  it is an attempt to be open to receiving all the impressions that the work can provide.  It is a shift toward the eighteenth-century concept of disinterestedness, which is clearly a denial of Arnheim's initial and intrusive interests:  an attraction to the work's sensuality..."  As a heterosexual male I take offense at the idea that my way of looking at women I find sexually desirable is always associated with the desire to exploit and dominate, that I am incapable of a sexualized look that is also caring or respectful, and therefore that in order to appreciate The Nude I have to set aside these naturally exploitative desires.  I do not have to be masculinist to be masculine, although I recognize that we all may have unconscious masculinist prejudices.  But let’s set that aside for more interesting issues. 

I think I can clear up one point here.  Brand sees those habituated to the male gaze as having to "sort through the confusion of interpretations" of the image of the Ingres nude and the image of the bruised Orlan.  The interpretations in question of the nude are simply those of masculinist IA vs. classical DA.  The Orlan case is a bit more complicated as she does not present herself on the operating table as an attractive object for the masculinist IA, or rather, she does only ironically presents herself as such, since for example she is “made up” even though on the operating table, whereas in fact, under the male gaze she can only be seen as sexually unattractive unlike the nude in The Source.   So the confusion here is significantly different in type in each case. 

In her essay Brand sets up Arnheim as a kind of hero, for unlike such disinterestedness theorists as Alison and Stolnitz, he saw that the work does not simply "yield" an impression but rather that a process of abstraction/subtraction is needed to attain DA.  This process, she argues, actually adds to his experience of the painting thus making him "more open to all the impressions that the work might provide." Brand will use this idea to construct a new level of DA for the feminist, one that comes after the feminist IA.  

However, as Brand correctly observes, the initial DA, even that of Arnheim, does not provide a full experience of the work, since it blocks significance that can only be regained by "imaginative exercise of IA" i.e. a switch not only away from conditioned viewing of the image formed by the male gaze but to viewing the girl, in the case of The Source, as "embarrassed by her nakedness." Such a switch, Brand thinks, opens one to "more impressions than ever before."

What I had not realized on my first reading of Brand but which is now apparent, is that the second, feminist, IA is a matter of adding a context, of telling a story, one that may or may not be literally true....it doesn't really matter.  It doesn't matter whether Ingres’ model actually had the feelings of being embarrassed by her nakedness. What matters is that she can easily be seen under this story since this story is true to a common or general experience of women who suffer under the exploitative male gaze.  That is why Brand refers to it as "the imaginative exercise of IA."  So, rather than subtracting context, which Arnheim recommended for IA, this is a matter of adding context, of "building" interest, one that opens the viewer to more impressions. 

So the process Brand envisions is from IA to DA and then to IA (the feminist IA that adds context), and then, but Brand neglects to make this entirely clear, back to DA again by way of a bracketing of the emotional level of response in order to attain the feminist intellectual level.  This comes out, rather vaguely, when she says, "The feminist viewer of Ingre's nude or Orlan's surgeries - whose tendency is to adopt a more physically and bodily based interested stance (IA) like Arnheim's - may also benefit from the lesson of undergoing an intellectualizing and abstracting process" i.e. of moving to the second, feminist DA.  The is confused by the fact that Orlan does not adapt an IA like Arnheim's since she explicitly offers her performance pieces as representing an ideal formulated by male desire and as having the goal of discouraging women from reconstructive surgery.  So, the images from Orlan's performance can now be seen in terms of the feminist theories of Mulvey and the feminist intentions of Orlan herself.  For Brand, the benefit of DA for the feminist observer is the "intellectualizing and abstracting process" not made available through the IA of feminist empathy.  Where Brand goes wrong, and against her own intentions, is to think of the feminist as somehow benefiting from the classical IA in a direct way, saying that "the feminist who looks upon Ingres' nude formalistically is self-consciously and deliberately shedding her feminist lens to view the work as disinterestedly as possible."  The problem here is with the notion of "shedding her feminist lens."

Brand mistakes her own theory when she says that, for the feminist, "[v]iewing La Source in terms of geometry and color adds to the variety of experiences she [the feminist] gains from the piece."  (168)  That is confusing the feminist IA with the original IA.   Brand just thinks her own "revised" DA may be more difficult when it comes to political art since, in the case of Orlan, one needs to "shift toward viewing bloody facial features as combinations of reds and purples, darks and lights..."  This is coupled in Brand's mind with a "shift to reflection on the concept of women and of art exploited by the performance series."  Yet just seeing the facial features in formalist terms is not the goal at all.  The goal is to see them in terms of the feminist IA and DA.  Brand is just confusing the traditional formalist perception advocated by Clive Bell and the intellectualist perception informed by feminist theory.

There is a deep reason for this and it has to do with Brand's misconception of her own idea of toggling.  Briefly, the move from IA to DA to feminist IA and then to feminist DA is not a matter of just switching perspectives.  The previous perceptions are carried into the later ones in a way very unlike the ambiguous figures which had so misled Brand, and very much like what John Dewey refers to when he speaks of the flow of art experience being one that carries the past into the present and projects into the future.  When, in looking at the photograph of Orlan's performance, one is "looking at bloody facial features as combinations of red and purples" this is not a matter of replacing the one form of perception with the other but rather of being very aware that these are bloody facial features as we attend to them formalistically:  you can't stop thinking of the fact that they are bloody facial features. There is no purely formalist way to look at this photograph, nor do I think we should even try.  The reds and purples take on a different look, a different intensity, when we know they are reds and purples of rendered human flesh, just as the initial awareness that this is human flesh is intensified when we focus on the formalist aspect of the work.  These reds and purples take on a different meaning again (and, let me suggest, increase in intensity) when we understand the entire performance under the feminist intentions of Orlan.  The process is not just one of opening up to new experiences, but cumulative.

Brand’s conclusion is not as powerful as it should be.  It is not simply that looking at the painting or the performance piece would open the feminist up to more experiences of a formalist sort but that there are other layers of meaning that enhance and enrich the experience as we work through them.   Further, some aspect of this is even to be found in the original construction of DA in the 18th century as we look at it now under contemporary lenses, insofar as it was directed against seeing things in terms of ego and possession and moved ethically towards treating the object portrayed as a thing in itself. My conclusion is that the "toggling" (perhaps mislabeled because of its association with a mere on/off switch) Brand describes is a way to deepen our understanding of a work and that the enhancement by toggling is not just additive but transformative in a progressive way.  This has implications that go far beyond debates over feminist interpretation since Brand's concept of toggling between DA and IA contributes to resolving the great debate between formalism and contextualism.

---

[1] lt seems peculiar that feminists would have a problem with men censoring feelings that have negative implications for women.  I wonder whether Brand has these other feminists right here.  

More on Bourdieu art and everyday aesthetics

Bourdieu's book Distinction provides an important source for everyday aesthetics.  I have already commented on it here.
But here is some more.  Sociology as Bourdieu understands it is a bit complicated...more like a combination of science and philosophy than science alone.  He insists that in order to truly understand the conditions of production and appreciation of objects of taste we need to bring culture in the normative sense back into culture in the anthropological sense.  On one level this would seem to be simply saying that we need to just give up on philosophy of art and do a kind of anthropology of taste.  But he sees this as reconnecting elaborated taste for refined objects with elementary tastes such as the taste for food flavors.  This sounds more like the kind of thing Dewey advocated:  i.e. a reformative approach not only to philosophy but also to social practices.  This appears to also be part of what Bourdieu means by "sociology."  I suppose that this is obvious to people in Sociology or at least to followers of Bourdieu.  So, sorry if I am stating the obvious.  

Bourdieu makes an interesting distinction between two ways of acquiring culture, one being in terms of educational level and one in terms of social origin:  the scholastic vs. the domestic.  And yet, he observes, the classroom also favors "those who have had early access to legitimate culture, in a cultured household, outside of scholastic disciplines."  He even notes that within the classroom there is a certain devaluing of "scholarly knowledge and interpretation" as scholastic.  Privileged, rather, is "direct experience and simple delight" which, presumably, comes to those who are cultured at home.  

The pedantic or scholarly approach, he argues, involves "mastery of a cipher or code" which gives us the "capacity to see."  That capacity is based on a certain kind of knowledge.  This is similar to Danto's theory of artistic identification where identifying something as a work of art requires an atmosphere of knowledge (but we will see later that the similarity is weak).  Here, it is perception that requires such knowledge.  Without knowledge of the code, the appreciator is lost in a chaos of sounds and rhythms.  Instead, he only perceives "sensible properties," for example that this lace-work is delicate, and cannot move to the level of the "secondary meanings."  For that, he needs the appropriate concepts.  He would need such concepts, for example, to identify "the specifically stylistic properties of the work."  The encounter here is what Bourdieu calls an "act of empathy" based on cognition, i.e. decoding. 

This idea of culture, again, is in opposition to that which sees it as a matter of "insensible familiarization within the family circle," where the "enchanted experience of culture" forgets the process of concept acquisition.  Here, what is considered is "form rather than function."  It is accepted in this context, and by the formalist (whom, after all, is the referent here), that artistic seeing can be applied to anything.  In the practice of art, for example in Post-impressionism, this implies that the mode of representation is more important than its object. The distinction is virtually the same as that of Danto vs. Stolnitz, for example.  (But again, we will see that this is simplistic and that from Bourdieu's perspective Danto and Stolnitz are one.)

The artist who follows the second path intends to be autonomous, to be "master of his product."  Such an artist rejects both the a priori programs of scholars but also their a posteriori interpretations of his work.  The method is to proclaim that his work has many meanings, that it is open.  Again, what gets primacy is what the artist is master of:  form and style and not referent and function.  Necessity here is limited to the discipline itself:  there is a shift from that which imitates nature to that which imitates art, the history of art itself being the source of its experiments.

But, oddly and paradoxically, I now find Danto here!  "An art which ever increasingly contains reference to its own history demands to be perceived historically; it asks to be referred...to the universe of past and present works of art."  Such historical perception refers to that which deviates from previous art and thus makes up a new style.  This is a mastery, Bourdieu insists, that comes through "implicit learning" i.e. from "contact with works of art."   One does not, for example, have to be able to explicitly distinguish the features that makes something original in order to make or appreciate art in this mode.  

The so-called "pure gaze" of the formalist then is really one based on historical knowledge.  Bourdieu identifies it with something in Ortega y Gassett, i.e. the idea that the human or that which is associated with the passions of ordinary lives is to be rejected by the modernist artists and appreciators.  It is the aesthetic, as opposed to the ordinary, attitude.  The ordinary attitude is associated with what is called "popular aesthetic" which affirms continuity between art and life and subordinates form to function. The "popular aesthetic" is that of the working class insofar as they reject formal experimentation and any the unconventional.  The popular aesthetic requires full identification between the spectators and the characters, as in Brecht's plays.  This, then, is contrasted against Kant's notion of disinterestedness (which is now associated with y Gassett).  Formal experimentalism rejects the vulgar enjoyments of the working class.  The aesthetic, or rather the ethos, of the working class is the opposite of Kant insofar as it does not separate what pleases from what gratifies or from "the interest of reason" or the Good.  Bourdieu seems to join them in this.  

So, popular taste reduces "things of art to the things of life."  Pure taste, by contrast, is opposed to the naïve and half playful relationship to the world characteristic of the working class approach to art.  

This leads Bourdieu to discuss what we would call aestheticization or even artification.  Even though art itself allows the greatest scope for purifying vision or "the aesthetic disposition," it is possible to stylize life anywhere, and in doing so we may "confer aesthetic status on objects that are banal or even 'common'." In doing this we are applying aesthetic principles to "everyday choices of everyday life," for example to cooking, clothing and decoration.

So, different ways of "relating to realities and fictions" is a matter of different positions in "social space" which is a matter of the habits of different classes:  "taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier."  Thus the oppositions in cultural practices are also found in eating habits as much as in differences in appreciation of high art.  The taste of "liberty," as opposed to that of "necessity," favors the manner of presenting food over the practical value of food, thus denying function.

So we return to the issue of sociology and the surprising idea that "the science of taste and of cultural consumption begins with a transgression that is in no way aesthetic." In doing so, "it has to abolish the sacred frontier which makes legitimate culture a separate universe" simply in order to find the unity of choices or preferences within certain classes.  For example, if one takes a distanced approach to music one will also do so for food.  Bourdieu recognizes how radical this is when he says that "this barbarous integration of aesthetic consumption into the world of ordinary consumption abolishes the opposition" which is the basis of Kant's aesthetics, i.e. between taste of sense and taste of reflection, the latter only representing, for Kant, the "moral excellence" and "capacity for sublimation" that makes us truly human.  What is opposed is this "magical division" which is "sacred" and a matter of "transubstantiation."  

Danto is defeated (if Bourdieu is right, anyway) and the aesthetics of everyday life is assimilated to the aesthetics of art.  This all explains why art (high art) legitimates social differences.

If Bourdieu is right then there is something problematic about having an aesthetics of the everyday.  What we should have instead is an aesthetics in which the distinction between the everyday and the refined dissolves and the distinctions so dear to Kant and his followers are set aside.

 

What is the aesthetic attitude? Stolnitz revisited.

It is common for readers in a discipline, even sophisticated ones, to dismiss writers and thinkers popular at one time by way of labeling them.  Then when you sit down and actually read something by that person carefully the position turns out often to be much more complex and nuanced than one would expect.  Carolyn Korsmeyer's Aesthetics:  The Big Questions contains a selection from Jerome Stolnitz's Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art Criticism, A Critical Introduction (1960) which defends and develops his own version of the aesthetic attitude.  The selection is followed by  Marcia Muelder Eaton's "Locating the Aesthetic," which came from her Aesthetics and the Good Life (1989).  It is easy to dismiss Stolnitz as a formalist uninterested in subject-matter and become an advocate of Eaton's contextualism.  But now, almost a quarter of a century after the contextualist revolution --- now that contextualism is our dominant form of critical practice, and has been for a long time -- it might be worthwhile to reread Stolnitz with a kinder and even more sympathetic eye, if for nothing else but to just gain some perspective.  I already tried to do that in my book, The Extraordinary in the Ordinary:  The Aesthetics of Everyday Life (2012) and in my previous article “Practical George and Aesthete Jerome Meet the Aesthetic Object,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 28:1 (1990) 37-53.  In the book I say: 

"One can look at an everyday streetscape from a disinterested perspective, focusing on sensuous and design features, and then switch to a perspective that takes into account history and context. One can follow Stolnitz in isolating the object from the flow of experience and from its interrelations with other things, and then toggle [I adopt this idea from Peggy Brand] to a non-isolated form of perception.  I have been arguing that taking the aesthetic attitude is taking an attitude that allows objects, environments or events to have aura.  Although either disinterestedness or interested perception alone might do this, toggling between interested and disinterested perception is more likely to heighten significance. The toggling approach may be applied to all types of aesthetics:  of art, of nature and of everyday life."  (198)  I still endorse this view.

So what more can we get out of Stolnitz.  Much of the selection in Korsmeyer's book is an attempt both to enrich our notion of what goes on with the aesthetic attitude and also to overcome some prejudice against the notion.  [True scholarship would look at Stolnitz's book as a whole, and also his entire life's writing.  But hey this is a blog.]  Let's assume for the moment that Stolnitz is right that our ordinary practical attitude towards things is such that we only perceive things in a partial way.  After all, it would be "stupid and wasteful to become absorbed in the object itself" under normal circumstances.  There is no value, for example, in absorbing ourselves in the aesthetic features of a stop sign:  we need to just know when to stop or go.  So the perception of things under practical conditions is "limited and fragmented."  It is sufficient just to identify the thing, something we do habitually, as when we choose a pen over a paper clip to write with.  As Stolnitz puts it, we "read the label" rather than look at the thing itself.  But when we pay attention to the thing itself for the sake of enjoying the way it looks or sounds [or...add the other senses] then we are taking the aesthetic attitude. This happens for example in attending to a play or even when we glance aesthetically at our surroundings while on vacation.

Stolnitz's definition of aesthetic attitude is "disinterested and sympathetic attention to and contemplation of any object of awareness whatever, for its own sake alone."  The rest of the selection attempts to explain the concepts in the definition. [Unfortunately Stolnitz does not explain "for its own sake alone":  what exactly is the "sake" of a landscape seen from a car?] 

The key here is that the aesthetic attitude is needed for having an aesthetic experience.  Stolnitz stresses that we are not taking an aesthetic attitude when we have a cognitive interest, as in that taken by a sociologist or a historian, or when our interest is in judging, as in that of an art critic.  This last point is somewhat surprising since Kant, who had also promoted the idea disinterested perception, had associated it strongly with critical judgment.  So, in a sense, Stolnitz's version of disinterestedness is even more purified than Kant's.  He further elaborates that the aesthetic attitude "isolates" the object insofar as it focuses on the look or the sound, and it is not seen, therefore, in the fragmented manner characteristic of practical perception.   The inference seems odd, but the idea is noteworthy:  that aesthetic perception is specifically not fragmented. 

Stolnitz further stresses that the aesthetic experience is not "un-interested" but in fact is "intensely absorbed."  This leads into the notion of "sympathetic" which has to do with preparation for the aesthetic experience.  The aesthetic attitude is sympathetic in that we "prepare ourselves to respond to the object" in order to "relish its individual quality."  He talks about this as accepting the object "on its own terms."  What this means is never made clear, as mentioned above, although he elaborates it in terms of "being receptive" to what the object has to offer perceptually, and inhibiting unsympathetic responses, for example of the sort we would have to a novel that does not accord with our way of thinking. So we are to "follow the lead of the object and respond in concert with it." This seems interestingly in accord with the recent school of object-centered theory that I discussed in a recent post. 

Stolnitz tries to explain this point further by talking of a sonnet by Milton written as a protest, but which now seems remote from us in terms of the "heated questions of religion and politics" involved. To be sympathetic to the work is to "give it a chance" to show what about it would be interesting to perception.   

Stolnitz also warns us that we should not see aesthetic attention is a matter of just looking or of a blank stare but rather something like, or understood in terms of, what happens when we listen to a "rhythmically exciting piece of music" where we are absorbed by the "energy and movement" or when we find ourselves sitting on the edge of our chair:  it is not passive.  

The key notion is "coming alive."  Stolnitz writes:  "In taking the aesthetic attitude, we want to make the value of the object come fully alive in our experience."  This requires that we prepare our selves to respond in terms of imagination and emotion.  It is not just that we attend to the object but how intensely we attend to the object.  We only attend aesthetically when we are wholly absorbed. And this is attended by activity.  An example of this is keeping in time with the music by moving one's foot, or responding in a muscular way sympathetically to a sculpture.  

Arnold Berleant has been a long-time critic of the aesthetic attitude and yet it is therefore ironic that he shares with Stolnitz an interest in this kind of activity:  it is clear that what Berleant attacks is not really what Stolnitz believes, that Stolnitz's notion of the aesthetic attitude is much richer than what we find in traditional attacks on it, for instance in the famous attack by George Dickie.  Like Berleant, Stolnitz stresses that we experience a cathedral actively through walking through it. 

Stolnitz goes further and, drawing from Hume, stresses that in acting in regard to the object we savor it fully only when we focus on its "complex and subtle details."  Like Frank Sibley, he stresses the role of the "able teacher" in being able to make a work of art "vital and engaging" by way of showing us things to which we might have been insensitive.  

This comment is followed in the reading by a sentence that should be a surprise to Stolnitz's critics.  The sentence states that this kind of awareness often requires "knowledge about allusions or symbols which occur in the work" as well as possibly "training in the art form."  So that which is external is not necessarily excluded from attention to the object's intrinsic features, a point he surprisingly shares with Marcia Eaton.  

I mentioned his reliance on Hume.  However this should not be oversimplified.  For Stolnitz, there is a specific purpose for "discriminating attention."  For Hume, that seems just to allow us to reconcile judgments or to condemn others.  But for Stolnitz, the matter is more object-centered:  it is for the work to come alive to us.  Again, he explains this in terms of listening to a symphony where keeping the themes in mind, following the development, appreciating the dynamic of their interrelations, contributes to an experience that has "greater richness and unity."  So it seems that aesthetic attitude is an attitude that has as its end product an experience of greater richness and unity based on understanding structure, among other things.

In conclusion, for Stolnitz the aesthetic attitude is not just a blank or passive stare, but rather is setting oneself in preparation for aesthetic experience (i.e. being fully absorbed in the object of perception), that preparation involving giving the object a chance to reveal its individual quality worthy of appreciation, treating it in a non-fragmentary way, learning about allusions and other background considerations, physically engaging with the object in appropriate ways, and generally doing whatever is necessary to bring the object alive in experience.  His description of listening to a symphony is paradigmatic of what this involves:  one has to attune oneself to dynamic interrelations that give rise to greater richness and unity.  Finally, this attitude can be applied to anything whatever, even a landscape seen from a car.     

Dickie is often said to have definitely refuted Stolnitz, but given my description of Stolnitz's view above, that hardly seem plausible. Dickie's view is that there is only one kind of attention, and either one attends to the properties or not.  My specific criticism of Dickie is to be found in the above-mentioned article, however I might mention here that Dickie's is an overly spare notion of the structure of consciousness.  He thinks that differences in motive simply cause the critic, the philistine and the aesthete to focus on different properties in the aesthetic object.  Properties are treated as static attributes of the thing in question.  I think that there really is a profound difference between the kind of fragmented viewing Stolnitz calls "practical" and the rich and complex form of experience I have just described, an experience that requires some training, some preparation.  If one approaches something with this preparation and has the appropriate aesthetic experience then one can be said to have had the appropriate attitude.  Attending to something in such a way as to give it a chance and to bring it alive is very different from attending to it in such a way as to track its properties:  tracking properties is really just another way to look at something as having certain appropriate labels, which is precisely the form of perception which Stolnitz sought to wean us from. 

Is it Disinterestedness OR Engagement? Short answer No

Arnold Berleant is one of my heroes.  His contribution to aesthetics has been amazing.  In rereading the first two chapters of his Art and Engagement (Philadelphia:  Temple University Press, 1991) I re-encounter a brilliant mind addressing aesthetics from a new perspective strongly informed not only by the spirit of John Dewey and such phenomenologists as Merleau-Ponty, but also by a keen interest in, and excitement about, movements in contemporary and avant-garde art, particularly those of the 1960s and 70s when artists in all the arts were constantly testing boundaries.  Berleant's main point in this book was to counter what he called "traditional aesthetics."  (He has continued to write books in aesthetics and, since his position on most issues has not changed significantly, I will henceforth speak of these views in the present tense.)  Unfortunately his notion of "traditional aesthetics" is something of a caricature since it essentializes something (aesthetic theory) that has evolved constantly over centuries.  Indeed, his own version of aesthetics is just another iteration of that long tradition.  When someone uses a term like "traditional aesthetics" it seems to be just a stand-in for the aesthetic theory he/she doesn't like and that he/she thinks that most of his/her elders, or perhaps most everyone in the field, holds to.  (Caricature is not necessarily a bad thing, and it serves an important rhetorical purpose in Berleant's intervention.  But one should also be able to step back from such things.)  What he means by "traditional aesthetics" seems to mean mainly the aspects of Kant's thought which were most strongly advocated during his, Berleant's, youth and early career.  "Traditional aesthetics" mainly refers to belief that the aesthetic perceiver should be disinterested or  distanced.  On this view, the perceiver should, in observing art and other aesthetic objects, take the aesthetic attitude.   The object itself should be seen as autonomous or in isolation from the rest of life; in particular, from practical matters.  Berleant's alternative is what he refers to as an aesthetics of engagement.  Again, I think that his intervention was brilliant.  It served to cast a bright light on the importance of engagement at all levels, breaking boundaries, and continuities between art and life.  

However, I prefer to see the confrontation between Berleant and "traditional aesthetics" as a moment in the dialectical history of aesthetics calling for, as such moments always do, a new synthesis.  Berleant's working assumption is that there is a very clear choice:  either aesthetics based on disinterestedness or aesthetics based on engagement.  I say, why not both?  Granting most of what Berleant says about the value of engagement, and even most of what he says about the value of various avant-garde productions, something should also be said, at this point in the debate, about the moment of distancing in the process of creating and appreciating art, nature and everyday life.  In short, Berleant has thrown out the baby with the bathwater.  (Too extend the metaphor:  wash the dirt off of the concept of disinterestedness and you find something worth keeping.) He thinks that the older ideas are "refuted" and "obsolete," and yet, in philosophy old ideas are never wholly refuted and never wholly become obsolete.

Berleant is of course right in attacking certain aspects of Kant's notion of disinterestedness.  Kant thought that the experience of beauty should be separated from sensory pleasure and even from ordinary emotions.  I just do not see how this can be done.  If I experience a flower as beautiful my experience of the color and smell of the flower is as important as the abstract design:  the design cannot be separated from the color since every shape and line is a colored shape or line.  So I agree with Berleant, against Kant, that the aesthetic experience is grounded in somatic activity.   At the same time experience of a thing as sensuously beautiful is enhanced through contemplation (another term that meets Berleant's disapproval).  In the process of appreciation, one inevitably isolates the object of aesthetic appreciation, whether it be a physical thing, an event, a situation, an experience or a thought.  This is not to say that the moment of distanced appreciation is the only moment in any aesthetic experience.  One can, and should, toggle back and forth, for example, between a disinterested or distanced appreciation and one that pulls in surrounding contextual considerations.  As shown by Peggy Brand and Ted Gracyk in various writings, there are advantages to look at a painting or listening to a piece of music without knowing or thinking about its context of origin, but just focusing on what is present, as long as one is also open to enriching that experience through another moment, one that allows bringing in these contextual considerations.  

Berleant's either/or approach is exemplified in the following quote:  "In the effort to keep them distinct from other activities and objects in human culture, our aesthetic encounters are usually channeled along a carefully paved course through official cultural institutions - galleries, museums, concert halls, theaters."  This is true.  But it is not a bad thing.  Lovers of the arts gain most of their best experiences in such places.  However, this true sentence is followed by another which it is supposed to imply: "Such confinement not only often restricts the force of the arts; it conspires to erect obstructions that inhibit our openness to artistic modes that do not conform to those requirements."  This is a mysterious inference.  That "usually channeled" implies "confinement" or a set of "requirements" is doubtful.   Even though many have thought that the existence of galleries and museums (with their respective gate-keepers) restricts non-gallery, non-museum art in some way, it is not at all clear that it does.  Graffiti artists, for example, are not kept down due to the existence of galleries in Chelsea.  Sometimes they are even offered shows in such galleries.  Berleant implies that "traditional aesthetics" only considers art that is accepted into such institutions as "acceptable."  But if traditional aesthetics is the aesthetic theory that stresses disinterestedness and contemplation there is nothing to keep appreciators of graffiti art to disinterestedly contemplate such art as a moment in their experience.  I am all with Berleant in opening up the range of legitimate aesthetic experience even to include things commonly considered to be kitsch.  I love St. Thomas More Church in San Francisco, which has gardens surrounding it filled with cute and humorous decorative statuary.  This is out of museum and gallery art and it no doubt has a religious purpose.  Nonetheless, one can bracket that purpose and just enjoy the playfulness and humor of it, i.e. in a disinterested fashion.  

Earlier I said that "traditional aesthetics" is something of a caricature in Berleant's work.  As an instance, he says that "Traditional aesthetics is uncomfortable with sharply new materials such as plastics, electronic sounds, and found words and objects." (18)  It is not only caricatured but turned into a person who can have feelings of comfort or discomfort.  It may be that Berleant is confusing traditional aesthetics with traditionalists in the arts in the mid 20th century.  Art traditionalists were indeed uncomfortable with these materials.  Traditional aesthetics, however, says nothing about materials and has no feelings about anything. 

In short, we cannot really have a meaningful discussion about "traditional aesthetics" unless the term is tied down to mean something specific.  If it simply means the predominant non-Deweyan non-phenomenological aesthetic theories of the mid-20th century, perhaps associated with such writers as Jerome Stolnitz (one of Berleant's opponents) then we at least know what we are talking about.  But I can't recall Stolnitz having a special problem with new materials based on his advocacy of disinterestedness.  Perhaps he did, but if you are disinterested, materials should not even matter.  Berleant thinks that traditional aesthetics has trouble "accounting for artist developments such as process art, where the product is secondary to the activity of producing it, and in explaining artistic activities that have purely ephemeral objects or no identifiable objects at all." (19)  I agree that an aesthetic theory that has problems accounting for these things is problematic.  However there is no reason why process art or the activity that produces it cannot be contemplated in a disinterested fashion.  Even conceptual art in which there is no identifiable object beyond a written statement that calls on us to do or imagine doing something is open to aesthetic appreciation from a disinterested standpoint.  Indeed, one has to isolate this object of appreciation in conceptual art from the practical perspective that would instantly reject it --- one has to do this in order to even get started on aesthetically appreciating it.  

Again, Berleant insists that with the rejection of traditional aesthetics "aesthetic experience ...becomes rather an emphasis on intrinsic qualities and lived experience than a shift in attitude."  (26)  I wonder how one focuses on intrinsic qualities or even takes certain qualities as intrinsic without bracketing the object and experiencing it as relatively isolated, i.e. by taking a special attitude towards the object.  The special attitude constitutes the intrinsic qualities as intrinsic.  Berleant's reference to "lived experience" is to the idea that "one need not dissociate oneself from practice and use in order to take something on its own terms, as disinterestedness would have us do."  (26)  In a way, I agree:  there is no absolute "on its own terms."  As a consequence, taking something "on its own terms" is situational and relative:  we treat things as if they had terms of their own.  Disinterestedness requires bracketing:  however, interestingly, this bracketing (taking certain relations as irrelevant...backgrounding them) involves drawing lines that can be drawn at different points, even so as to include practice and use in some of their dimensions.  One can focus on the practice of flute-playing in appreciating a flute performance while bracketing out the practice of concert production, the practice of arts financing, and the practice of bourgeois self-legitimation, all of which have all sorts of ties to any particular performance.  One can, similarly, have a disinterested appreciation of a church without bracketing out its usefulness as a church, but still bracketing out one's own views about religion.  Maybe this should be called "relatively disinterested" perception as opposed to absolute disinterested perception:  but, then, absolute disinterested perception would be impossible anyway. 

Nietzsche saw art as a duality involving both Apollonian (read "disinterested") and Dionysian (read "engaged") aspects.  In his eagerness to stress the Dionysian, Berleant forgets the importance of the Apollonian dream-world.  Berleant makes his allegiance to a one-sided Dionysian approach explicit when he refers positively to "Dionysian acstasy, which the contemplative tradition from classical times on has always viewed with suspicion and hostility."  His Dionysianism leads to talk positively about mysticism and an "inexpressible merging of person and place, of human and the universe."  Nietzsche himself, unlike Berleant, saw this merging as an illusion every bit as much as the illusion of the Apollonian dream-world.  What is certain is that we often feel as if one with the object of appreciation, or as Berleant observes, with the people we love.  This fictional experience is immensely important to the arts.  When Berleant speaks of "an essential reciprocity [which] binds object and appreciator as they act on and respond to each other through an invisible interplay of forces" (43) I can only agree -- if we can throw "as if" in there somewhere.  This also goes for  when he says "aesthetic engagement...joins perceiver and object into a perceptual unity."  (46)   At the same time, the Apollonian gives us the stage on which this occurs.

Berleant makes much of how contemporary theater in the round merges audience and actors.  Audience and actors are merged in the Dionysian experience, but as Nietzsche has shown in his analysis of the origins of tragedy, the distancing of what happens on stage is inevitable.  Experiences of theater "in the round" are not be notably different from traditional theater.  The audience is still contemplating another realm, a dream world created for us on which stage the Dionysian illusion of redemption and rebirth is performed.  And this is where I think Berleant makes another mistake:  he thinks that the detachment of a separate world is unique to the enlightenment era whereas it goes back in human history as far as ritual goes.  Art is an extension and development of primitive ritual:  tribal societies usually have places, people and things that are somehow detached from our world, that one could call distanced.  When you enter into ritual you must take a special attitude.